not native visitors

February 23, 2015

Jimmie P is the story of the psychoanalysis of a Native American - I think they call him a Plains' Indian, but the setting is New Mexico. Jimmie is a veteran who was not seriously injured in the second world war but who suffers from continuous headaches, periods of disorientation, depression and severe fatigue - in short, PTSD in an era that did not yet recognize the disorder. Medical tests are negative and finally he is sent to a facility where the psychiatrist calls in an anthropologist with psychological training to conduct Jimmie's psychoanalysis. The anthropologist knows enough about Native American culture to be able to talk with Jimmie using 'insider' lingo that Jimmie understands, and through compassionate listening and a non-pathologizing attitude, allows Jimmie to open up and share about his past traumas, most of which took place in childhood. I thought the film-makers' did a good job of showing how childhood traumas create problems for people later in life. For example, Jimmie witnessed a little girl drown when he was only five years old - nevertheless even as a tiny child himself, he felt he ought to have tried to save her. Instead, terrified, he ran away. Even so much later in life he still carried around with him a great deal of guilt over that perceived 'failure', unreasonable though it was.

So overall the film was a good portrayal of a successful analysis, with the added interest of a beautiful setting in New Mexico - or somewhere out west. I saw the film a few weeks ago and already I'm forgetting important details. There's a minor subplot about the analyst's personal life: his change of identity after fleeing Europe during the Nazi era, changing his Roumanian-Jewish name to a French equivalent. He also receives a month-long visit from his high-class married girlfriend, providing some romantic interludes from the psychoanalytic process. All in all a pleasant and interesting film, a lovely night's entertainment that stays with you afterward. I give it four stars.

What I liked best about this film was that it highlights the importance of cultural awareness in psychoanalysis or, I would think, any kind of counseling. Culture is one of our current-day hurdles to mutual understanding and even to democracy. The problem is, that in coming to understand the cultures of others, we learn things about our own culture that we weren't really quite 'aware' of, and that is often rather painful.

February 02, 2015

I've completed my reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. I thought her writing was simply superlative in Passing, and I haven't changed my opinion. I found 'Quicksand' to be well written and very interesting from the autobiographical angle, especially her trip to Denmark; having visited relatives there myself, I thought she captured many aspects of Danish culture accurately, economically and well.

I also found this novel revealing of Larsen's own personality, her sensitivity and volatility in particular, even more than in 'Passing,' and have realized that she must have intended to depict parts of herself in both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry in 'Passing', as she must also have done with Helga Crane and Anne Grey in 'Quicksand.' Unless, I'm going to discover more about some 'close friend' in "In Search of Nella Larsen" which I'm reading right now. However, I doubt that I will, as she did not seem to make close friends in her life. She certainly seems to be one of the most alone women I've ever encountered in my reading!

I found the ending of Quicksand supremely tragic, and also I couldn't quite buy it. But I'm wondering if the fate she assigns Helga Crane doesn't reflect her own fears for herself? Having been raised 'white' for all intents and purposes, (although as a scapegoated, marginalized white so to speak), she must have felt alienated from much of black culture and perhaps frightened of certain aspects of it, that while not necessarily 'endorsed' by African-Americans was at least not totally unfamiliar to them as it would have been to her. What a lonely character she was, in life - talk about Quicksand.

I might suggest an interesting companion piece to read along with Larsen's two novels, and that is a family memoir, "The Sweeter the Juice," written by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip about her mother who was the lightest child in an African-American family descended from the brother of Martha Washington (just to add a little historical interest), and who was essentially 'forced' to pass as white, experiencing heart-searing loss and feelings of abandonment throughout her life, while searching for her siblings. Haizlip helped her mother, Margaret, at age 80, finally track down and reunite with at least one of her sisters. Margaret experienced the 'opposite side of the coin' to Nella's experience, having looked white while being raised in a black family, yet finally finding herself set adrift in a white world.

This is a well-written book, and shows how the pain of segregation cut both ways.

Another book that is not judgemental about 'passing', but rather takes a more compassionate view, is Allyson Hobbs' 2014 book, "A Chosen Exile." I highly recommend this one!

July 06, 2011

Today would have been the 57th birthday of my dear friend, Risa, who died in January of this year from breast cancer. I love this picture of her, and have always loved it, in particular. It just seems to me to capture her intense love of life.

You can imagine my surprise when I discovered this image of an Aztec goddess called Xochiquetzal. Here's what I wrote in my journal this morning: "Have been fascinated by the similarity between her photo and the Aztec depiction of Xochiquetzal, Precious Flower, the Goddess of Flowers, Love and Beauty. She lives in Tamoanchan, the Place of Our Origin and guards over the Xochitlicacan, “the Flowery Tree of Life, whose flowers, with only a single touch, bring good fortune and fidelity to those in love.”

“Xochitl, Flower, is the Aztec symbol of purification and perfection. Xochitl lives and dies for a moment of beauty. Xochitl is truth, completion and the maximal statement, the essence that is born at the height of an evolution. It’s about going for the highest potentials, bringing visions into reality, and art. Flowers are sexual organs. Xochitl is love and the search for union. It’s happiness. It’s sex. The Sun of Flowers is when humanity comes to flower.” (Quotations from "The Aztec Virgin" by John Mini)

"Xochitl lives and dies for a moment of beauty." Boy, was this ever true of Risa! I think that's why we all loved her so much!

May 16, 2011

One thing I miss in Berkeley is 'the front porch.' I used to wonder about the dearth of porches here, and my husband said it was because there are no warm evenings. Well, that seems like a reasonable explanation to me.

But there aren't any porches down in Los Angeles either, at least not in the numbers you see in other parts of the country. I also don't see any typical 'American porches' in films set in Europe, don't remember seeing any porches in my own brief travels there. So I began to wonder if the American porch, as an extension of a living space, not merely as a covered passageway, is possibly one of those vestigial native american influences we find scattered throughout american culture with no 'provenance' so to speak, because we deny all native american cultural influence as a matter of course.

So, I started my research, looking at the etymology of the word 'porch.' Wikipedia says: "A porch (from the Catalan word porxo)[1] is a structure attached to a building, forming a covered entrance to a vestibule or doorway.[2] It is external to the walls of the main building proper, but may be enclosed by screen, latticework, broad windows, or other light frame walls extending from the main structure.

"There are various styles of porches, all of which depend on the architectural tradition of its location. All porches will allow for sufficient space for a person to comfortably pause before entering or after exiting the building. However, they may be larger. Verandahs, for example, are usually quite large and may encompass the entire facade as well as the sides of a structure. At the other extreme, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, Michigan has the longest porch in the world at 660 feet (200 m) in length." [Significant that the longest porch in the world is located in prime native american country, and I'll bet it has been lined with rocking chairs at certain times in its history.]

With a Spanish origin of the word and concept of 'portico,' it would seem obvious that porches are not really an 'Anglo' thing, although the American-Anglos have adopted them wholeheartedly. However, you don't see porches in Great Britain. Yes, there was much more Spanish and Portugese influence in early colonial East-Coast America than is acknowledged, but even in Spain, the porch was not really an extension of the living space, a place where comfortable chairs were set out and people did housework, like veggie-prep, household repairs, tools maintenance, child-care, etcetera. This is the way porches were used in our regional area, especially by the native americans, who often sat low to the floor while performing these household tasks, surrounded by cooling grass-mat screens. Porches in those other parts of the world - like Spain - seemed to be used for taking the air, being shaded while watching an event in the courtyard or looking out at a vista, not for daily living.

Wikipedia goes on to say that porches are found as parts of churches in England or as parts of temples in India. Yes, that kind of 'porch' or really 'covered passageway,' is seen in lots of kinds of temples around the world. In New Englad, according to Wikipedia, the porch evolved from a mudroom or covered vestibule. I've been in mud-rooms, and they really don't seem like porches to me.

On the other hand, the Algonquin-speaking Native Americans, like the Lenape, had bungalow-shaped dwellings with a roofed extension in summer, shaded on the top and sides by grass mats, much like those still in use in my neighborhood in poor Philadelphia in the 1950's. This extension to the house (wikaon) was called 'alewikaon' in Lenape, which is usually translated as 'porch,' The less native/more white-identified households in Philly adorned their porches with canvas awnings, but there were still plenty of the old grass-curtains in use when I was a child. We still had the old Lenape baskets in use, too - my grandmother had one, and I often saw them in the homes and yards around the neighborhood - and we also used a distinct local native-patterned cloth. I wish I still had a piece of that. I would not be able to recreate the pattern today even though as a child it was extremely familiar to me. I'm afraid I very ignorantly scoffed at these native vestiges, influenced as I was by the many recent European-immigrant children to disdain my american roots. Nobody's fault, just the way it is. Kids will be kids, and we didn't know anything. But I'm afraid I may have hurt my mother's feelings. I'm very sorry about that. I wish I had known, but my mother's verdict was that I looked unambiguously white and therefore there was no reason to teach me anything about our native roots, and it might even be dangerous to try to do so. So, that's how it went.

But anyway, I think - imo, in my opinion - the typical American porch is a vestige of our old Native American lifestyle, the lifestyle adopted by so many newcomers to America from Europe who did not only impose their own cultural imprint onto the landscape but were also influenced in turn by their new homeland and its people, or who married into a native or quasi-native family and tradition. So much of the truth of all that has been lost in the struggle for survival, which has involved denials and denouncements, hiding and secrets, lies and white-lies, etcetera. But let's not go there. The season is hard upon us to go out and enjoy our front porches. Bring up the rockers and the glider from the basement or garage, put out the grass carpet and the wicker furniture, set up the awning, make some lemonade. I hope this kind of lifestyle is still happening somewhere in America.

April 05, 2011

I'm finally getting around to reading jack d. forbes, university of california, davis, professor of native american studies. I'm starting with one of his scholarly books, "The American Discovery of Europe" and also his only novel, "Red Blood." I am really impressed by the novel. It is written in the peripatetic motif popularized in the English tradition by Smolett, but found also in that sperm-seed of western literature, Don Quixote. So, nothing much happens, there is no suspensful 'plot,' but the protagonist, Jesse, travels around and meets different people of various native american backgrounds, reflects on what he sees, and gains insight into what it means to be native american, or part-native american, at this particular juncture in time.

It seems to me he covers every possible permutation.

It's a great loss that Jack Forbes has recently died, in February 2011, because he was clearly a man of great insight with a basically gentle attitude toward differences, a lot of love, compassion and intelligence. A jewel. He was of Powhatan-Renape and Lenape background, which may mean he looked more brown or more white than the popular conception of what 'Native American' looks like. He writes a LOT about all the various shades of color and subtleties of feature found in our population. Young white readers, in particular, (from what I've seen in the comments on blogs that deal with these issues) often find this kind of writing 'racist,' but really, it's just revealing the racism that is already there in our society, but goes unacknowledged. There's been a fairly large acknowledgement of the racism heir to the plantation-slavery of Africans prior to the Civil War, but there is less awareness of the widespread slavery prior to the rise of the South's cotton industry. Slavery or indentured servitude were very common throughout the thirteen colonies and early states and involved white, black and red persons, who often united in bands of community and through marriage. Their descendents, along with the descendants of many later immigrants, form the 'unentitled' masses of America today. The lower classes and working classes.

For people who fall into that latter category, 'Red Blood' is a helpful book. For people like myself, with perhaps only a smidgen of native blood but a fairly wide streak of influence from the native forbears, it is comforting to see just where these influences come from, and that we have a sort of 'right' to our beliefs and our lifestyle. We are not simply somehow defective white people or 'anti-social' or whatever label might have been applied to us in our difference. We are not simply 'black' Americans, either, but that is someone else's story to tell, not mine.

For myself, to look at me, I understand why no one would credit that I am part-native american, or part African, even though my dna tests show that, and my family (barely) acknowledged it, regarding it as something too precious to share abroad, only eliciting criticism, ridicule or negativity. Rather, our truth was like a precious pearl kept secret in a special container deep inside our home. Anyway, I'm not going to try to convince anybody - about myself, I mean. It will be a fairly private thing for me, and an online post doesn't really change that.

I look forward to reading more Jack Forbes and I encourage you to read him too.

October 30, 2010

My husband has read the Mari Sandoz book Crazy Horse: the Strange Man of the Oglalas two or three times and has always encouraged me to read it as well. So, finally, just a few weeks ago I took out Larry McMurty's book, Crazy Horse: A Life on CD's from the library and was able to hear it being read while commuting through the park to work - about a 45 minute trip - twice a week, and also while driving on any other little errands or visits. It was only three disks and went fast.

In the meantime, I was reading a memoir called Off to the Side by an author named Jim Harrison, whom I'd never heard of, but then I don't keep up with the NY Times Best Sellers List. I have a more Daoist approach and let the Dao brings books to me. :-) And this is an example of how that process works! I still haven't finished the memoir, but I liked it so much that I decided to try one of Harrison's novels, and as luck would have it, Dalva was the first novel to come into my hands. And who is one of the featured characters of the major sub-plot? Crazy Horse. So the story of Crazy Horse, and his friend He Dog, and the military outpost of Fort Robinson - all of this was fresh in my mind as I read Dalva. I've visited Fort Robinson once, by the way, knowing nothing of Crazy Horse's death there, but feeling averse to 'the energy' as they say.

Anyway, Dalva is a masterpiece of writing, most of it first-person narrative with a female voice (Dalva's), told in flashbacks to adolescence and other stages of life from a 45-year old standpoint. The central section of the book is narrated by a crazy professor who is researching the journals of Dalva's great-grandfather, an early comer to the Sand Hills area of Nebraska, and someone sympathetic to the Sioux, in fact an agonized witness to their demise.

I find it interesting that I've characterized the professor, Michael, as 'crazy' and that this was also the appellate of Crazy Horse. Harrison mentions that for the Sioux the word 'crazy' really meant something closer to 'enchanted' or 'magical.' Well, the professor's academic mind is something like fly-paper, everything sticks to it, and his personal mind is very mobile, not being undergirded by a strong character. He is thoroughly opportunistic, desperate and needy, but talented! Harrison does a marvelous job in capturing the chaos of someone like Michael. In fact, all of Harrison's characters are rich, nuanced and feel thoroughly authentic. Despite Michael's failures, Dalva and her family are very kind to him, protective and nurturing, rather like the attitude of the Sioux towards those they regarded as 'crazy', such as Dalva's great-grandfather, a johnny-appleseed-Methodist Minister whome they saw as 'too strange to kill.'

Much of the book takes place in natural settings around the Niobrara River, the kind of country I just love and tried to depict in my own novel, Desert Sanctuary. Harrison recreates the vitality of life lived close to nature. Anyone who has ever experienced such a life will be grateful to him for this book, and other readers will appreciate the window onto a life that is still available here and there in the west.

What an incredible book! And what a wonderful coincidence to have read McMurty's Crazy Horse: A Life just before reading Dalva.

October 17, 2010

i've discovered a new author i like a lot. jim harrison has written poetry and fiction set usually in the areas in which he grew up (Michigan, Minnesota, northern mid-west states) or where he maintains a second home today in the southwest, Arizona, New Mexico, Southern California. his writing reminds me a bit of louise erdrich, and i'll say more about that later.

I discovered jim harrison by (uncharacteristically) reading a mystery novel set on the north coast of California (one of my favorite places on earth) by Janet LaPierre who has one of her characters, Verity Mackellar, mention that she is reading a good memoir called "Off To The Side." So, I googled that title, and discovered that it is a real book, by author Jim Harrison.

I began to read the memoir, and wasn't sure whether or not I was going to connect. His voice is very masculine, his concerns seemed at first not to relate to me - a friend said his concerns were very regional, midwestern - booze, dames, and hunting. But I found that I really did enjoy his style of self-disclosure, his way of communicating something honest, yet occasionally diverting, in the sense that he can surprise me with a turn of phrase, and not just a knack of phrasing but a nice juicy sliver of insight. I began to feel this guy is like some kind of Americana wisdom-bum combining the likes of Erich Fromm, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac and Carl Sandburg - if you can believe such an ungainly combination - plus something that is characteristically himself.

The more I read, the more I liked. And so I soon went out and picked up one of his novels, an early one called Dalva, written, I believe, in 1988.

This is when I began to see the similarities to Louise Erdrich. I began thinking to myself, is this a style of writing that is somehow organically produced by the north-country? I was thinking 'he is like the male version of her, and as an author, she is the native-american-part-white voice to his white-american-part-native voice.' in other words, erdrich, who is part-German and part-Ojibway, and writes both parts brilliantly (imho), specializes perhaps in the native-american perspective in her literature. i'm assuming harrison is part-Sioux because he always includes part-Sioux characters in his novels, (although i don't recall if he mentioned it in his memoir, however, it seems likely to me, given things he writes about his father's people). Based on my own experience with home-grown variety native-american people (as differentiated from hollywood-style or even AIM-style "indians"), I would say that both of these authors write the white, the native-american and the mixed characters very very well, and offer us something of a perspective that I seem only to find in literature that combines these two American influences quite consciously.

This indicates to me a degree of authenticity.

Let it be said, simply, that i am very happy to have found jim harrison's work, and to put it on my shelves next to Louise Erdrich's. Oh, and by the way, just out of curiosity, I googled 'jim harrison + louise erdrich' and found that others see similarities in these two writers too!

I may write more about harrison in the near future, as there are some specific topics he gets into, in Dalva, that I find interest me personally.

May 06, 2010

i've been thinking lately that it might make more sense to tell people that my mother was a kind of creole. Doing research, i've discovered that academics identify a group centered in the chesapeake bay area as 'atlantic creoles.' the atlantic creoles are a simiar ethnic makeup to the well-known louisiana creoles - french, english, spanish, african american, native american and sometimes caribbean.

Atlantic Creoles can be searched on Wikipedia, yielding lots of links, although they do not have a page devoted to them. I first came across the term in a text on the Atlantic slave trade when I was researching my African roots.

I know I've said before that I am grateful to all my ancestors for leading me on a search for them because I've learned so much about the world, especially Africa, Native America, and all places with so-called mixed-race populations. I've met so many wonderful people online through the course of the journey too.

But I think the single most significant discovery I have made so far has been to re-connect with the Moorish Science Temple, to read their original teachings and realize how I absorbed them at my mother's knee. This has always been my 'true' spiritual education, despite the fact that, on a conscious level, my mother tried to make me into a Catholic, something I continuously found to be at odds with my own spiritual experience and nature, and which I struggled with for years, and made various sorts of peace with, only to feel dissatisfied at the core. When I studied theology at GTU, I was very fortunate that the feminist movement was active at the time, because I found people who could hear me say that I felt my real spirituality had come to me from my mother's line, and was not from 'the church' but seemed, rather, to 'ride' along with it, rather like I was doing with Catholicism at the time. The feminists agreed that women had their own spirituality, although what they meant, and what I meant, by that phrase were not exactly identical. What I know now is that my mother had a dual religious upbringing - one in the Catholic church, which was the societally-validated norm (in highly Irish-Catholic Philadelphia), and the Moorish Science Temple, which her father's church of choice.

My reconnection with the Moorish Science teachings and my almost irrational drive to find out 'the secret' and reconnect with my roots leads directly to my present spiritual path, with Amma,and Devi spirituality, out of south India. My grandfather would be thrilled, and as for me, I feel ever-so-much, at long last, at home.

February 26, 2010

I received this red cedar basket in the mail yesterday from my friend, artist Mary Snowden of Anacortes, Washington, ceremonial weaver and sculptor. I had commissioned the basket and requested a dragonfly theme, because of a very early dragonfly experience i had myself at about age five that has stayed with me. i was standing back in the marshes, where i was not supposed to go alone, of course, and was visited by a very large, camoflage-colored dragonfly with heavily netted wings. He perched on my upper arm, covering almost the entire length of it, and I had no idea what it was. It was a sort of alien-encounter for me, and I was terrified. We stood that way together for what seemed forever. I finally closed my eyes and prayed that it would go away, and when I opened my eyes it was gone. I felt relieved, but kind of missed it too.ifelt a very deep curiosity about its identity and nature.It was a sort of heightened experience of the marshes and of nature in that environment, and also of the deep mysteriousness and terror of life.

"The Dragonfly is an ally through mysterious times and will show us the way through illusion, and lead us ultimately to our own inner truths. Dragonfly medicine is very important. Dragonfly's can be found on every continent of our Mother Earth. They are a precious part of our Mother Earth's gift to us as one of our winged significant teachers and helpers. Thank you Dragonfly."Red Cedar Bark is sacred and essentially priceless. Not every cedar tree can be gathered from, making it rarer. Then after the bark is gathered traditionally ( a good hike in the forest), it sets for one year. Then the process of slowly paring it both horizontally, and vertically begins.

"The cedar is very powerful when gathered from a living tree, which continues to live, and essentially, your basket is alive. There is a saying here on the Northwest Coast in Indian Country, "Be good to your cedar, and your cedar will be good to you" It is the considered the most sacred 'powe/healing' element here in the NW, and cedar storage boxes are used to house ceremonial items. It is also is the symbol of Red face Paint (the healers). The inner bark of the red tree can only be separated from the tree, only a few weeks of the year. Any other time, it is solid wood, with no divisions in its tree Cambrian. During this special time, it separates itself for the people. It is highly revered."

I found what Mary wrote about the dragonfly to be very meaningful. i've read quite a few 'takes' on the dragonfly's medicine, but this one certainly rings true to me, and has been proved out in my life as I approach sixty. An interesting age for this basket to come to my home.

i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner. these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound. against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative. due to their circumstances in life, they aren't a part of the mainstream culture of art or performance, don't have much money, haven't gone to art school, or studied choreography (until very recently), and no one is paying them to perform the way they do. They are just doing it! and have been doing it for hundreds of years, and for over one hundred years in the present form as a parade on Broad Street. This is a grass-roots phenomenon, a manifestation of the creative surge that comes up from the ground, fills the body and spills out in an arciform design, not unlike the shape of the back-boards pictured above in these Handsome and Handsome-Trim suits, or in the shape created by nature in the white peacock, pictured below, which reminds me of some of the old Handsome Suits and Handsome Trim suits that featured a white snowflake motif.

since reconnecting with this aspect of my childhood - the mummers day parade - i can recognize where i got the idea that ordinary people, working class people, had some sort of inalienable right to create art. that the rich and privileged do not have sole domain over creativity. (this has really been an issue for me, due to the fact that when i was young i was unable to swing the necessaries to attend art school myself - long story of 'lack of support' around preparing myself to study art in any kind of formal way. another time.) of course, we see and acknowledge that truth in the areas of african-american music, for example, or in appalachian blue-grass music. perhaps in music, more than elsewhere. and i'm certainly not saying that study doesn't add grace, refinement, complexity and many other features to the various art forms. i simply mean that the impulse to create something beautiful, uplifting, fun and self-expressive was demonstrated for me by the mummers year after year from an early age. even the forms of their costumes, such as the Handsome Trim suits, express the impulse of creativity and expression, and is it any wonder i picked that message up? yes, we were working class folks, for sure, and thanks to our times a number of us moved up in terms of income and even class, but not everyone. i have an abiding appreciation for what we had and still have, and i see the joy of that treasure expressed in the mummers day parade.